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Pull out Pramanik’s beard in panchayat polls, says Bengal minister; ignites row
Union minister of state Nisith Pramanik contested the 2021 assembly election against Bengal minister Udayan Guha and defeated him. Guha returned to the assembly only in the bypolls held after the BJP told Pramanik to retain his Lok Sabha seat and quit the assembly
KOLKATA: West Bengal minister Udayan Guha has ignited a political row in the state with his speech in Cooch Behar earlier this week in which he asked Trinamool Congress (TMC) workers to pull out Union minister of state for home affairs Nisith Pramanik’s beard and moustache.
“Pramanik after winning the 2019 Lok Sabha elections didn’t visit his constituency. In the coming elections, we will have to pull out his beard and moustache. Prepare the local residents accordingly,” Guha told TMC workers at a rally in Dinhata in Cooch Behar on Wednesday.
Pramanik, who was in the Trinamool Congress before jumping over to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) right ahead of the 2019 general elections won from Cooch Behar Lok Sabha seat, defeating TMC’s Paresh Chandra Adhikary.
In the 2021 assembly elections, Pramanik contested from the Dinhata assembly segment and defeated Udayan Guha by 57 votes. But the BJP, which made a vast improvement to its tally in the state assembly, could not stop the TMC from returning to power. Pramanik subsequently resigned from the assembly to retain the Lok Sabha. Udayan Guha won the assembly seat by a record margin of 1.64 lakh votes, a record in Bengal’s assembly poll history.
In 2021, Pramanik was inducted as a minister of state in PM Modi’s team in Delhi. A year later, chief minister Mamata Banerjee inducted Udayan Guha into the state cabinet in July this year.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Udayan Guha continued to adopted an offensive posture. In a remark seen to refer to the opposition parties, the minister also told his party workers: “If anyone comes and tries to create trouble in the area, call me up. I will ensure that he stays in jail till the panchayat polls.”
The minister’s comments provoked the opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist) and BJP to hit out at the minister and Mamata Banerjee.
CPM leader Sujan Chakraborty said the TMC leader’s remark was on expected lines. “He is after all a TMC leader. If the party chief can say she will chop off the tongue and if a party MP can say that he will skin TMC’s critics to make shoes, then what can you expect from a party legislator? They are making such statements to hide their failures,” said Chakraborty.
Bengal BJP spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya said they just need to wait for a few months more. “After that, people will hound the TMC leaders and they will have to shave their own beards and moustache to hide their identity,” said Bhattacharya. Top BJP leaders in the state have claimed that the present TMC government won’t last beyond December 2022.
TMC spokesperson Jay Prakash Majumdar suggested that the opposition was reading too much into Guha’s speech. “While speaking at a political rally, a leader may use rhetoric which may not be true. But it is also true that we need to be more reserved in making statements in public,” he said before giving Guha’s statement a spin. “I think Guha was referring to the seeds of violence that the BJP is sowing and was urging the TMC workers to uproot that. The BJP leaders are giving statements to trigger violence,” he said.
